Raveis offers home data on Web site

This was about three months ago and the sky, at least according to the national media, was falling all over the housing market.

But that didn't track with what he saw in the local data. So the founder of the 33-year-old, Shelton-based real estate, mortgage and insurance company that bears his name - a man whose background is in computer system design and analysis - decided to make local information available to anyone who can visit his Web site.

Visitors can click on the local housing data link on the home page, www.raveis.com, then pick a city or town in Connecticut or Massachusetts. What they can see are charts - showing unit sales, median sales price, total inventory, time on market and sale to list price ratio - a list of recent sales by address or a summary of some of that information for the most recent three months. His information, gathered from the various multiple listing services, is now current to October.

The five state multiple listing services are owned by the independent owner-brokers of the firms in their geographic area, said Don Hull, president and chief executive of the Consolidate Multiple Listing Service, which covers greater Fairfield County. Because Raveis is one of the owners, the data is his to use.

All the owners have an equal share and each salesperson in their offices subscribes to the system. Those salespeople can provide the information to their customers.

"I can't disagree with him on that," Hull said when told of Raveis' irritation with the national housing reporting.

Home sales in Connecticut are down 7.8 percent so far this year from 2006, Hull said, which in turn was off from 2005.

"It's a softer market today, no question But you're also comparing against five or six years of unparalleled, superior, marketplace."

"It's not cratering, the marketplace. It's still relatively strong," Raveis said, showing data that buyers in many areas are receiving 95 percent of the list price.

He plans on soon expanding the data to include county and state numbers and year-to-date figures. And in a week or so, he'll add a Google map feature, which will show viewers a neighborhood shot.

"Everything is very local," Raveis said of real estate, but the national stories were instead looking at overall data.

"Our members have been quite upset," he said. "A lot of context is being lost."

For example, volume today is what it was five years ago and a recent NAR study found price gains in 93 of 150 metropolitan areas.

The national figures, Molony said, are useful to the government, for planning and policy purposes. Local data, he said, shows correction in "overheated" markets such as Florida, California, Arizona and Nevada, but the biggest problem areas are in those that never boomed.

Places like the upper Midwest, he said, where job and-population losses weakened the economy.

"There is no such thing as a national weather forecast," he said.

However, "We think that we're in a flat period now," with sales growing slowly in 2008 and prices flat until excess inventory is sold.

While Molony had never heard of a real estate firm making local data available to the general public, it's not a new idea to Rocky Hill-based Prudential Connecticut Realty.

"We've done it for years on our Web site," said President Candace Adams.

Their information, also from the services, is part of a quarterly real estate market report that includes the company's interpretation of the market, she said. The site breaks the information down by county and municipality and tracks days on market, median price, number of units and percentage change for all between the current quarter and that quarter in the previous year.

"It can give you a comfort level if you're a seller or a buyer," she said of the data.

Adams, too, thinks the national perspective is wrong when looking at real estate trends.

Connecticut's housing market, she said, has been a "very balanced, normal, healthy market."

All those interviewed, however, did not dismiss the impact from the subprime mortgage mess that started over the summer, when rising interest rates drove variable rates higher. For some borrowers, especially those with less-than-spotless credit who took out subprime loans, the reset pushed mortgage payments out of reach, resulting in foreclosures or forced sales.

"Definitely, there's been an increase in foreclosures as a whole," said Stephen Kindseth, an attorney specializing in real estate at the Bridgeport firm Zeisler & Zeisler P.C.

The increase came mostly in the middle- and lower-middle class areas such as Bridgeport, where people used "exotic" mortgages - such as no downpayment or rates adjustable after two years - to buy a home.

"In Fairfield County, there still is a significant amount of wealth," Kindseth said, and those residents can generally withstand higher payments.

But even people on fairly solid financial footing are having trouble getting loans from lenders that have become more skeptical.

"I think a lot of people are sitting back and waiting to see what happens over the next few months," he said.